


Emerging Concepts in Human Friendship: a metanarrative review and new qualitative data

by EstellaB



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Academy Era, F/M, Gen, a story not an actual metanarrative review, a very silly idea that I have nonetheless taken pretty seriously, canon compliant to at least 3x22, i avoid the wiki for fear of spoilers, jemma simmons is a delightful and passionate little weirdo, sixteen and achingly shy, sorry if the simmons parents have canon names, though i did read a few papers for this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:28:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27421978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EstellaB/pseuds/EstellaB
Summary: When Jemma Simmons finally visits her family after a year at SHIELD Academy, she mostly spends the time holed up in her room doing research. This isn’t new. But the topic just might be.
Relationships: Leo Fitz & Jemma Simmons, Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons (hotly debated)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13





	Emerging Concepts in Human Friendship: a metanarrative review and new qualitative data

**Author's Note:**

> When Jemma says in series 2 that she had never thought of Fitz as anything but her best friend, I assume she’s telling the truth, because she seems convincing and she’s an awful liar. But: does Jemma know what a best friend is? Because it seems quite likely that Fitz was her first one, so her sample is n=1 and he’s an outlier.

Quite literally the first word out of her mouth when she runs up to them at the airport is “Fitz”. Her parents glance at each other. They’ve been wondering about this for a while.

“Fitz couldn’t find the gate for his final flight so I stuck around just to be sure he’d make the connection; sorry I’m a bit late.” She hugs each of her parents in turn. “Hello!”

It is extremely apparent from the first moment of the holiday that _Fitz_ has become Jemma’s favourite topic. _Look, here’s a victory photo from after I finally beat Fitz at Carcassonne. I was having trouble coming up with a way to get better magnification on my slides so Fitz modified my microscope and you wouldn’t believe how well it works now. Actually, the Christmas party at the Boiler Room was really terrible because everyone else was drunk and boring, so we just went back to Fitz’s room and played Mariokart._ There is no story that doesn’t, somehow, wind up back at Fitz. They had been expecting this, but perhaps not to this extent.

“Didn’t you say Fitz hated you at the start?” her mother observes apprehensively, after almost a full day of him. “You’ve only really been talking for a few months. This is becoming awfully intense for a relatively short friendship – even,” she adds, seeing Jemma’s mouth open and forestalling her, “a best friendship.”

She looks at her mum, puzzled. “But Fitz and I _are_ friends.”

“Of course, I…” Maria Simmons pauses. Her daughter doesn’t look like one of the world’s foremost biochemists, two PhDs, on track to become the youngest ever SHIELD agent. She looks like an anxious child who’s been lonely for most of her life. “I’m just saying, you’re quite new to having peers your own age. You might not want to put quite so many of your eggs in this one basket, socially speaking.”

“It’s different with Fitz.” Now she sounds like a teenager as well, in that she is angry and confused and cocky all at once. “You can’t imagine what it’s like, Mum, to finally have someone who doesn’t need me to walk him through everything I’m thinking, baby step by baby step, before we can talk about it.”

It’s arrogant, but you know what? It’s also true. Maria had had plenty of friends by the time she was Jemma’s age, and they’d talked about films and music and who they wanted to kiss behind the bike sheds. Jemma has never had any of that – maybe it is fine, in her situation, to roll roughly fourteen friendships into one and then cling to it like it’s treasure. Maria decides not to pursue the topic any further that evening. They’ve just got Jemma back, and there’s no reason to believe that the mysterious Fitz is trouble - just that she’s a sixteen year old girl, suddenly lit up from the inside, so they’re _assuming_ he’ll be trouble. The poor lad is probably just as relieved to have a friend as Jemma is. No need to go alienating her the minute she steps foot through the door.

Curled up on the carpet by the fire, Jemma jumps as her phone buzzes, and then beams at the message. She holds it up so they can see the screen. “Fitz made it home okay and he had decent chips for the first time in a year.” Well, that’s innocent enough, at least.

\--

Jemma finds that she is talking about Fitz a lot, and tries a couple of times to stop, since she doesn’t want to get into it with her parents. This leaves her bafflingly short of conversation. They aren’t saying anything about it after that first night, but they aren’t saying anything about it very loudly. Her uncle, stopping by to give her a hug and ask how his favourite genius is, is less subtle.

“Sounds like you and Fitz are practically joined at the hip – surprised you could tear yourself away for long enough to grace us with your presence!”

“Fitz and I are best friends,” Jemma repeats stubbornly, but with a bit less conviction this time. 

Everyone seems to think this friendship is something peculiar or abnormal. Are they _right_? 

Ever since the day when they finally spoke to each other, her friendship with Fitz has felt like the _most_ normal thing in her life. She’s never belonged anywhere, but neither has he, and now it’s like each of them has grown out of the other’s side. The way Jemma thinks has always been alien to everyone – even her parents, who have done their absolute best – but Fitz has never needed explanations. Clarification of concepts outside his field, sure – just as she needs that too – but not her leaps in logic or her fascination with everything or the hundreds of questions she asks of the universe every day. Also, she thinks all his stupid jokes are hilarious and they like and hate all the same episodes of Dr Who. (Sometimes, when they have come up against a seemingly impossible problem in the lab, Fitz will make his voice quiet and sober, and intone “I’ve got the solution… it’s _antiplastic_!”. It makes Jemma laugh more every time he does it – last time he had them both in helpless giggles until they were aching all over).

Is that _not_ what a best friend is?

Jemma Simmons is nothing if not curious, so that evening she goes up early to bed and opens her laptop. Frowning slightly, she calls up JSTOR and PsycINFO. These aren’t the search tools she’s used to using, but she is sure she can find the right words. She tries various combinations of “friend*” and “best friend” and “emerging adult” and “social bonding”, and skims the abstracts, trying to find what she wants. How have so few people studied this? What are psychologists and sociologists even for if it isn’t for this? Grumbling to herself under her breath, she downloads a few papers that look at least somewhat promising, and gets to work.

She’s always been able to read quickly, to skim through papers and pull out pertinent details, to absorb and retain information she’s only seen once. Now, though, she takes her time to sink into each study in detail, combing them through for the least glimpse of what she feels like she has with Fitz. But there’s nothing. Nothing in any of those papers gives the slightest indication of _why_ best friends are able to finish each other’s sentences, for instance. Or why is it that the world disappears when you and your best friend are working on something really exciting together, in a way it never quite does when you’re working alone, or with someone less interesting? There must be an _actual reason_ , but none of the studies have picked up on it at all. Most of the studies don’t even bother with adult friendships, focussing on little eight-year-olds sharing crayons and playing bulldog. 

The problem with qualitative research, Jemma decides – one of the many problems, anyway – is that it seems to be conducted by incompetents who don’t know how to ask the real questions. She could definitely do a better job. Come to think of it, she _will_ do a better job. Qual stuff was covered in the Introduction to Research Methods training they made her sit through before she started her doctorates, and she can vaguely recall some of the sessions. What with that and a quick refresher online, she can definitely figure it out.

\--

The next day, Jemma disappears into town before anyone else is even up, and comes back just after breakfast armed with an expensive dictaphone, a packet of highlighters, and a big pad of paper. She vanishes into her room again, and her parents watch her go. They decide, though, that this is probably just part of Being Jemma’s Parents, and wait until she emerges to tell them what’s going on.

She comes back downstairs four hours later, all professionalism and clipboards. She’s even wearing one of the striped shirts she normally reserves for conferences, and she’s tied her hair back. Jemma announces that, since she’s going to be training as a field medic next year, she needs to get to grips with all sorts of clinical and applied science with which she has not previously been familiar. Healthcare professionals even use – good grief – _qualitative research_ to inform their practice, which is obviously ridiculous. Still, if she wants to get ahead of the class, she’s going to need to practice her skills. Would her parents please each consent to an interview so that she can get a feeling for qualitative methodology? Just so that, when she’s wading through research papers next term, she can know what it looks like in practice. It wouldn’t be too tricky. Just about something easy. Say… friendship? They could each talk about some of their most important friendships. The data won’t be published or used in any way.

Jemma Simmons has always been a terrible liar, and her parents know that better than most, but they glance at each other when she’s not looking. They agree to agree.

\--

Jemma commandeers the conservatory for her research space. She sets it up very professionally, with her dictaphone and her notepad on a coffee table, and, after some thought, two comfortable chairs at what she considers to be a conversational angle. Her neatly-typed two page interview guide, based on the reading she did last night, is stapled and clipped to her board. Her parents toss a coin to see who goes first, and a few minutes later, her dad settles into the interview chair and they get started.

(A real qualitative researcher would never have conducted an interview that so strongly resembled an interrogation. This is, on balance, one of the reasons Jemma is not suited to the paradigm).

“Well, of course,” her dad says, eventually, after a full hour of probing, “it depends on what you mean by 'best friend'. Your mum is my real best friend, and she does finish my sentences occasionally.”

“ _Da-ad_ ,” Jemma whines, forgetting that she is Mature and Professional. “It’s not like that at _all_.”

“What’s not like what?” he replies, innocently. “I thought you were just practising your semi-structured interviewing skills. Are we talking about something specific?”

Jemma turns beet red, scans her notes, and ploughs right on through. “So, can you tell me more about your working relationship with Uncle Thomas?”

Her mum is no better. Even though she knows – she _knows_ – that her mum has always been a social butterfly, dozens of friends on speed dial, parties or the pub every weekend – for some reason she is holding back, downplaying the relationships, refusing to give over the detail that Jemma needs in order to answer her question.

“Honestly, Jemma.” It’s been about forty minutes, and Jemma is no closer to an answer. Her mum looks annoyed, and Jemma feels briefly guilty, but not guilty enough that she doesn’t want to know. “I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had lots of friends. I’ve just never had one friend that I wanted to be with all the time, do everything with, never wanted to be apart from. Most of my friends exhaust me after I’ve been with them a few hours. The only one who doesn’t is your dad.”

Jemma doesn’t protest this time, though she is by no means convinced. She scowls down at her field notes and calls the interview to an end. For reasons she can’t put her finger on, she’s in a foul mood for the rest of the day. 

\--

“So, do we talk about it with her?” Maria asks her husband, as they are getting ready for bed. 

“Or do we keep quiet and not ruin the only real friendship Jemma’s ever had?” He sighs. “It’s probably going to get complicated for them one way or the other. They are literal geniuses, though. Hopefully they should be able to work it out between them.”

They are both quiet for a moment, thinking that if Mystery Fitz also tries to resolve his personal difficulties with extensive reviews of the literature, it is probably going to be a while. “It’s lovely to see her with a friend, though,” Robert says eventually, “especially someone who seems like he actually understands most of what she says.” Since this is something they can both agree on, they wish each other goodnight. They fall asleep wondering what the morning will bring.

\--

That night, around 2am, Jemma creeps over to her laptop, opens up her old searches, and takes a deep breath. She types in “pair bonding OR partner*”, and adds “humans OR primates OR mammals”. After a few mortifying seconds of arguing with herself, she modifies them with “sexual”, and, after a few more seconds that are even worse, “romance OR romantic”. She downloads the first twenty PDFs that pop up, and then turns everything off immediately. Rushing back to her bed, burning with embarrassment, she buries her face in her pillow and at last falls into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

\--

In the morning, her equilibrium is somewhat restored. Her dad has made pikelets for breakfasts, and Jemma polishes off several before cheerfully announcing that she’s going to spend her morning reading in the local coffee shop. Her mum catches her dad’s eye at that – Jemma can’t quite read the expression, but it might be relief. She wonders what her parents would say if they knew.

There are a bunch of papers on her laptop that she doesn’t – quite – think she can read in the same room as them. Perhaps not in the same house. Which is all quite silly, because hello, she is a _literal PhD biochemist_ and when it all boils down to it, this is just that. But somehow, with the idea of Fitz having got tangled up with the content of these papers, she just doesn’t think she can do it. Not with spectators. As she sets out, she feels mostly anxious about what she’s going to find – which is also silly. Scientists shouldn’t shy away from the truth, and love is just chemicals, and anyway she doesn’t fancy Fitz. She tells herself all these things very firmly as she sits down, and again as she takes the first mouthful of her tea, and a final time as she opens up the first paper.

Two hours later, Jemma closes her laptop with a mixture of frustration and relief. The papers about pair bonding aren’t helpful either – it doesn’t seem like that’s what’s going on. Most of them talk about how hard it is to be in a long-term relationship, what it’s like to partner with someone day to day but still constantly find yourself blindsided by the way they think. Apart from the first few bewildering months, her friendship with Fitz has always been… effortless. She can’t imagine the type of miscommunications and misunderstandings that the participants describe happening with him. How do you fall out when you know what someone’s going to say before it’s even out of his mouth? It’s not as though Fitz never surprises her. It’s just that it’s generally either with something that makes immediate and perfect sense, and she wonders how it never occurred to her before, or they have a belligerent and heated row before realising they’ve argued themselves onto the same page.

It’s a relief that she hasn’t fallen in love with Fitz. She thinks that if she ever did – even for a moment – she’d probably be done for. Why take a crowbar to your most important relationship? At the same time, it would have given her two clear choices: tell Fitz; don’t tell Fitz. Carefully, she doesn’t explore the spike of adrenaline her body supplies at the thought of talking to him about all this. It’s only natural that the idea of poking about in her most important relationship causes anxiety. She’d hate to mess it up; now that Fitz is in her life she can’t remember what it was ever like to be without him. There’s the rub: apparently it’s atypical for best friends to never want to be parted. They aren’t in love, but perhaps they aren’t best friends either. What _are_ they?

\--

Jemma’s research activities gather pace over the next week. She compels everyone who comes to the house to sit through an interview about the nature of friendship. Her mum’s friend Karen, her cousin Cynthia (who was just trying to return a DVD), three of her dad’s colleagues, and, on one occasion, the postman. Carefully, methodically, she transcribes and codes and analyses the transcripts, developing themes and gathering them into theories before discarding them. Her parents watch her getting more and more frustrated. She’s carting a folder full of carefully annotated printouts of articles, interview transcripts, field notes, and observations with her all over the house. It’s not the weirdest she’s _ever_ been, but it’s not a million miles off either.

“My methodology must be off,” she says one afternoon, crossly, waiting for the kettle to boil. “Maybe if I interviewed _pairs_ of friends.”

“Maybe.” Her father sneaks a peek at the folder, which she’s left on the table while she makes her tea. The transcriptions and the codes are all in English, but Jemma’s notes and observations are written in a cipher of her own. He could probably crack it if he tried, but if it’s important enough for her to keep secret, he probably shouldn’t. “Jemma, love, aren’t you taking this… prepping-for-next-term business a bit too seriously?”

She huffs at him, but without any real venom, and sits down next to him. “I just want to understand.” Sighing, she extracts the folder from his grasp and wraps an arm around it protectively. “I hate it when I don’t understand.”

He squeezes her hand and suggests that they take a break to watch Pointless. Jemma is a genius, but she has been too busy developing her specific knowledge to acquire anything more general, so he beats her hollow. They laugh like drains until they’re both feeling better.

\--

Jemma’s parents intervene when they realise she is in danger of flyering for research participants at the local shop. There’s only four days left of her holiday, they haven’t seen her in a year, and anyway she doesn’t have ethical approval. 

\--

They all agree to go hiking the next day, instead. It’s something they love doing as a family – Jemma in particular, since she can tell them about all the fascinating species they come across that you wouldn’t see in an urban area. This year, she’s particularly interested, because she took soil samples last year, and since then the local plastics factory has closed. She wants to know what effect that’s had on the area’s bacteria, so she spends the rest of the day planning what samples she’s going to take, watching old episodes of Star Trek with her dad, and helping her mum to bake biscuits to take on with them. They all have a friendly debate about whether Picard or Sisko is a better captain, and whatever has been in possession of her for the last week seems to have lifted for the time being.

During their hike, though, Fitz’ name keeps bubbling up to the surface of Jemma’s conversation – much as it has since she arrived back; much as it has for the best part of a year – but now when it does, she cuts herself off every time and a worried crease develops between her eyebrows, before she forgets and brings him up again. By halfway through the walk she looks miserable and – very unusually – confused. Her parents don’t tease her, don’t mention it at all, but it is impossible for Jemma to talk about her training or research or social life without mentioning Fitz, and every time she does, that puzzled, unhappy look gets a little worse.

“It sounds like you’ve made a really wonderful best friend in Fitz,” Robert says, after a couple of hours, because he just can’t bear it any more.

Jemma’s face clears straight away. “I have!” she replies, happily, and bounds off to see how the pH of the stream has changed since the last time they were here.

“Think it was the right thing to do?” Maria asks quietly, once Jemma is far enough away that she won’t be able to hear.

“I was worried she was going to put the poor lad in a CT scanner the minute she got back to see if she could find her answer there.” They both laugh at this, albeit somewhat guiltily, because Jemma is Jemma and they love her very much the way she is. “I bet you a tenner she still takes a blood sample.”

“She probably already has. Not fool enough to take you up on it, anyway.”

They watch Jemma scraping moss off of a tree into a blue sample bag (B is for Blue is for Biological – Fitz’ system – which he instituted hastily after finding part of a cat liver in the lab fridge without proper warning. They have heard in great detail about the development of the system, Jemma rolling her eyes fondly at Fitz’ disgust). “Whether they’re friends or whether it’s more than that, it seems like he’s making her very happy,” Maria concludes at last, and it is their last word on the subject for a very long time.

\--

Jemma is waiting for him at the airport with a suitcase full of Yorkshire Gold and Dairy Milk, and her heart in her throat. What if, after all of her work this holiday, she sees him and things feel strange or different? People have been nudge-nudge-wink-winking at the Academy for months, but they were strangers. Idiots, mostly. It’s a lot harder to believe this friendship isn’t something unusual now that her parents have weighed in. She doesn’t think she can stand to lose him – already, her life has wrapped itself around him so entirely that it’s hard to remember he wasn’t a part of it a year ago – but she’s feeling nauseatingly, irrationally nervous.

“Simmons!” He appears in her peripheral vision, rushing up to her, two paper cups of undoubtedly disgusting airport tea in hand. He’s wearing his favourite, faded old jumper, one of the cuffs unravelling, and he has a startingly short new haircut. After handing over her tea, he grabs her into a clumsy hug – she only just avoids spilling her drink all over him.

And, suddenly, she has her answer. Simply put, their friendship is remarkable because _they_ are remarkable. She and Fitz. For the first time in both of their lives, they are two remarkable people who are no longer on their own.

\--

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone is wondering what Fitz is doing during this holiday: with marginally better emotional intelligence, he’s watching four romantic comedies a day (notebook in hand), trying to work out if he’s in one and eventually deciding that he’s not.
> 
> Also, I should say that personally I am Mixed Methods, and will defend the importance of qualitative research to the hilt. I just can’t see Jemma ever going in for it. And kids, please do not conduct surreptitious non-ethically-approved studies on your family and acquaintances.
> 
> I read a bunch of early 00s papers about friendship for this story, since I figured that was what Jemma would be reading in 2006 (?). They are very thin on the ground, and mostly about children, and one of them insists that I am more likely to develop substance misuse issues if my best friend is a man. I don’t blame Jemma for being suspicious of their quality.


End file.
